“A movement to protect consumers and strengthen cyber safety”
I want to address what happened to Neeraj and me last week. Of course, it was quite shocking to us as well and honestly very disheartening. But today, we want to talk about what actually happened and more importantly, what we’re going to do about it.
On March 21, we were taken into police custody in connection with a fraud complaint. Three days later, on March 24, a Thane court granted us bail, finding that prima facie, no case was made out against us. The fraud at the centre of this complaint was carried out through a fake website — coindcx.pro — by impersonators who have no connection to our platform, our systems, or CoinDCX. No money moved through CoinDCX. No transaction occurred on our exchange. The complainant himself confirmed in court that he did not know us and had never met us.
I’ll be honest: our experience was deeply unsettling. Not because we doubted the facts — we knew from the first moment that this had nothing to do with us. But because it made something painfully clear: the ecosystem we operate in doesn’t yet have the tools to tell the difference between the people building this industry responsibly and the people exploiting it.
Think about what this precedent means: if a scammer uses your brand, your name, your face in a fake website and defrauds someone, you can be arrested. Not the scammer. You. This Could Happen to Any Founder, Any Business.
That has to change. And we’ve decided that CoinDCX will lead that change — not with words, but with actions. Today, we are announcing Digital Suraksha Network (D.S.N.) — a ₹100 crore commitment from CoinDCX to build the cyber safety infrastructure that India’s digital finance ecosystem needs but does not yet have. This is not a crypto problem. This is a problem across any company which has a digital footprint.
Let’s understand this:
- In 2025, Indians filed 28.15 lakh cybercrime complaints — a 24% spike over the previous year. Total financial losses: ₹22,495 crore. Investment scams alone accounted for 76% of that money. (Source: Ministry of Home Affairs data, reported by ThePrint, February 2026)
- Of the 28 lakh complaints filed, only 55,484 became FIRs. That’s a conversion rate of less than 2%. The system catches the money sometimes. It rarely catches people. (Source: MHA data)
- 47% of Indian adults have either experienced or know someone who has been a victim of an AI voice-cloning or deepfake scam — nearly double the global average. 83% of those victims suffered monetary loss. (Source: ORF / McAfee analysis, 2025)
- India’s UPI infrastructure processed 21.7 billion transactions worth ₹28.33 lakh crore in January 2026 alone. Every one of those transactions is a potential attack surface. (Source: NPCI data, reported by Storyboard18)
- And this is all before AI scales. Deepfake fraud attempts globally spiked 3,000% in 2023. Deepfake files surged from 5 lakh in 2023 to a projected 80 lakh in 2025. The next wave of fraud won’t come through fake websites. It will come through cloned voices, synthetic video calls, and AI-generated identities that are indistinguishable from the real thing. (Source: Keepnet Labs / Sumsub)
Every online user in India is a potential victim. Every WhatsApp group is a potential attack vector. And the infrastructure to protect 1.4 billion Indians from this does not yet exist.
We want to be clear on how we would be putting this fund to use. The Digital Suraksha Network is fundamentally different. It is not about protecting one platform. It is about building the shared infrastructure between regulators, platforms, and citizens that prevents fraud from happening in the first place which could protect every Indian who participates in digital finance.
Here is what Digital Suraksha Network will build:
1. Consumer Education at Scale — “Caution Before Transaction”
Over 100 million Indians use crypto. Most have never been told how a regulated platform actually works , what KYC means, what FIU registration ensures, or how to check whether a website is real.
The Digital Suraksha Network will fund “Caution Before Transaction” , a nationwide initiative to give every Indian the tools to participate in digital finance safely. Multi-language content across India. A public platform powered by the Fraud Intelligence API helping users to always verify before transacting. Partnerships with consumer protection bodies. And integration with school and college financial literacy programmes.
Not just crypto. Digital finance broadly. Because fraud does not respect category boundaries.
We will be launching a 24×7 WhatsApp helpline which will be free, open to everyone, not just CoinDCX users. Before you send money to an unknown platform, before you click on a link promising guaranteed returns, before you share your KYC details with someone you met on Telegram — message us. We will verify it for you in real time.
2. Open Fraud Intelligence API
In 21 months, CoinDCX has documented over 1,200 fraudulent websites impersonating our platform. That data has been sitting inside our systems. That changes now.
We will build an open API that makes this fraud intelligence available in real time to law enforcement, financial platforms, telecom providers, and browser companies. We are inviting every crypto exchange, fintech platform, bank, and digital lender in India to share the fraudulent/ namesake websites. The more platforms that participate, the faster scam operations get flagged and shut down.
Think of it as a shared immune system for India’s digital finance ecosystem.
3. Cyber Safety Infrastructure for Law Enforcement
Most police stations in India are not yet equipped to investigate digital financial fraud at the speed it operates. A fake crypto website can go up in minutes and vanish before an FIR is filed.
The Digital Suraksha Network will fund training programmes for state cybercrime cells on blockchain forensics and digital asset tracing, a dedicated rapid-response unit that provides technical support to law enforcement on active fraud cases, and technology grants for central and state Cyber Crime Coordination Centres.
4. Industry Cyber Safety Standards: A Call to Regulators
CoinDCX has been actively engaging with LEAs and Government bodies and supporting them with below:
- Enforcement Directorate: Partnered to provide secure custody infrastructure for seized digital assets, deploying multi-signature wallets and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) solutions within investigative frameworks
- Delhi Police: Capacity building and training on crypto-related investigations
- Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy (SVPNPA): Knowledge sessions on virtual asset investigation
- Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C): Training and collaborative engagement
- Income Tax Department: Technical support and information sharing
- Goa Police: Co-launched the Cyber Surakshit Goem campaign for public cyber fraud awareness
- Gujarat National Law University: Engaged on research around crypto asset regulation
The DSN will further strengthen the efforts. We are calling on SEBI, FIU-IND, and the Ministry of Finance to work with the industry on common cyber safety standards for all digital financial platforms in India.
Digital Suraksha Network will commission independent research on the scale of digital fraud, fund a multi-stakeholder working group to draft recommended standards, and publish quarterly “State of Digital Trust” reports with transparent data.
We know that no single company can solve this. Fraud networks are sophisticated, cross-border, and evolving daily. They make use of AI that makes them exponentially harder to catch. But someone has to start.
We are putting ₹100 crore on the table because the ecosystem cannot afford to wait. I am asking every platform, every regulator, and every Indian who participates in digital finance to join us.
We want to ensure that anyone building in India like us can do so with confidence, and not with fear.
Sumit Gupta & Neeraj Khandelwal
Co-founders, CoinDCX
